Francis Nyamnjoh

Prof Prof. Nyamnjoh: Xenophobia at odds with SA 'rhetoric of inclusivity and human rights'

Originally published by the University of Cape Town.

Everyone in South Africa – citizens and foreigners alike – should be worried by the recent spate of attacks on black foreigners that started in KwaZulu-Natal and have subsequently spread to other parts of the country, says social anthropologist Professor Francis B Nyamnjoh.

It is most unsettling that South African political leaders and policy makers are not doing enough to encourage South Africans to disabuse themselves of the illusion that their problems can be solved through the logic of exclusion and scapegoating of certain types of foreigners that has pervaded, paradoxically, since the dawn of democracy in 1994. What is happening in Durban and KwaZulu-Natal reawakens a monster that political leaders and policy makers should have sought a way to bury for good after the xenophobic violence of 2008.

"Politics na Njangi: You Scratch My Back, I Scratch Your Back”: Socio-Cultural Understandings of Politics in Cameroon

By Francis B. Nyamnjoh

This paper uses the Cameroonian institution of “njangi” and the tendency to compare politics to this institution and practice to illustrate the universality of politics as a game of interest, interdependence and domesticated agency. The paper argues that the narrow focus on the autonomous individual in liberal democracy takes attention away from the complex, nuanced and collective interest-driven reality of politics in countries that claim the status of model democracies. Scholars of African politics have tended to uncritically internalise the rhetoric of the autonomous individual and of all-powerful leaders in their studies of political institutions and processes on the continent. One of the outcomes has been a misrepresentation of politics on the continent as a game of group and individual interests in which there are neither permanent patrons nor permanent clients nor permanent winners and losers.

Download Nyamnjoh_Politics na Njangi_2013

The Greenhouse Effect of Colonial Education in Africa

By Francis Nyamnjoh
(A revised version of this paper is published by the Journal of Asian and African Studies (15 February 2012, DOI: 10 1177/002190961141724) under the title: "Potted Plants in Greenhouses: A Critical Reflection on the Resilience of Colonial Education in Africa")

Abstract
This paper argues that education in Africa is victim of a colonial and colonising epistemology. Whatever appellation we give it, this epistemology takes the form of science as ideology and hegemony. With rhetoric on the need to be competitive internationally, the elite have modelled education in Africa after educational institutions in Europe and North America, with little attempt at domestication. This journey, endowed with the mission of annihilation or devaluation of African creativity, agency and value systems, leads to an internalised sense of inadequacy. It has compelled Africans to “lighten their darkness” both physically and metaphorically for the gratification of colonising and hegemonic others. The paper argues that the future of education in Africa can be hopeful through a meticulous and systematic creative process of cultural restoration and endogenisation, in tune with the negotiation and navigation of myriad possibilities in the lives of Africans small and big, poor and rich, rural and urban, and in between. If Africa is to be party in a global conversation on knowledge production and consumption, it is appropriate that it does so with the interests and concerns of Africans as guiding principle.

Click here to download or read the article.

Eradicating ‘Cultural Poverty’

By Francis Nyamnjoh (Originally published on The Broker)

On reading through the IOB evaluation report I’m particularly struck by the emphasis on the sectoral approach to aid. It is as if normal life is lived in disconnected segments, and as though the successes scored in one sector cannot be cancelled out by the failure to address the needs in other sectors. Of course, it could always be argued that no single donor has resources enough to intervene simultaneously across a broad spectrum of sectors. But even so, this begs the question of what informs the choice of sectors and, even more important, what quantity and quality of research should inform the choice of sectors in order to guarantee successful outcomes.

Intellectual and Social Responsibility in Scholarship: Lessons from Professor Issa Shivji

Francis B. Nyamnjoh reflects on the central role Issa Shivji has played in the development of African revolutionary scholarship.

It is 15th July 2006 at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Issa G. Shivji, at 60, is giving his valedictory lecture. Titled “Lawyers in Neoliberalism: Authority’s Professional Supplicants or Society’s Amateurish Conscience”, the lecture marks the end of a rich and distinguished 36 year career of selfless service that started as a tutorial assistant in May 1970 and was crowned with full professorship in July 1986. The lecture is on a theme that has been at the centre of Shivji’s humanity and scholarship since his student days in East Africa and the United Kingdom.

Fishing in Troubled Waters: "Disquettes" and "Thiofs" in Dakar

By Francis Nyamnjoh

(Copyedited & Copyrighted version published in Africa, Vol.75 (3) 2005, pp. 295-324)

Abstract
This discussion traces metaphors of consumerism, commoditized sex and sexified commodities that proliferate throughout urban Africa, signaling the intensified globalisation of images of desire and opportunity on the one hand, and chronic poverty and destitution on the other. Focusing on sexual economies in Dakar as a case in point, the paper attempts an analysis of how, in situations of increasing scarcity and transurban articulations, language, sex, possession, loss, self-construction, and self-corruption mutually shape each other. The paper seeks to represent the textures and intricacies that arise as the interdependencies among status, pleasure, appropriation, seduction, and livelihood are worked out.

Changing Communication Dynamics in Africa

Francis B. Nyamnjoh
Originally published in Media Development, 2005/4

African people are often bitter about the fact that the cultures and worldviews of others have coloured their own outlooks and, in certain cases, claimed centre stage in their lives. This makes it difficult to articulate what people consider their authentic cultural values with the freedom and confidence they would like to enjoy. The following article identifies a certain nostalgia for a real or mythical golden age prior to the unequal encounters with cultural others that have reduced people to playing second fiddle even in matters of utmost concern to themselves and their communities.